


Tshuva

by grainjew



Category: Pocket Monsters: X & Y | Pokemon X & Y Versions
Genre: (i say about a story with sapient magic flower creatures in it.), Gen, Teshuva, anyways. hoo boy. this relationship destroyed me! i died, az ruled a little hill-fort in fantasy brittany i dont make the rules, his brother’s descendants did a whole lot of embellishing, that would be historically inaccurate!, this bronze age king totally did not rule all of modern kalos lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 08:36:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20561390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: (or: once upon a time, there was a pokemon, and there was a king)AZ and Floette have, in their own ways, been putting off this conversation for three thousand years.





	Tshuva

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fallingwish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingwish/gifts).

> feels weird to write game fic… i dont usually do that. but az and floette’s story was specifically made to devastate me in specific, so,
> 
> in the spirit of elul, here’s a fic about saying sorry

After everything, AZ walked without stopping until he was a full day out from Lumiose City, feet sinking into marshy ground. The sun was deciding whether or not it was a good time to set, sending long, thin shadows to weave patterns with the grass and the trees — AZ’s face was warm with it, too, and the light of it danced and sparked off waterlogged earth.

He had always loved the Laverre marshlands — even after three thousand years, it was so easy to get lost in them. When he wanted to be close to home but couldn't stand familiarity, couldn’t stand the crash of waves or the way clumps of sunshine-yellow gorse bent in the wind, or the memory, tracing outlines in the air like phantoms, of all the people and all the pokemon he had known, losing his way was a blessing.

He paused, considered the slant of sunset, the slight breeze. He sat down on an oak’s fallen trunk and said, “Floette.”

Floette alit on a cattail across from him and didn’t say anything at all.

“Floette,” he said again, and felt something shatter in his voice at the word. Felt something shatter behind his eyes, along his bones, until his cheeks were wet like the ground was wet, splotchy and catching sunlight, until he was trembling. “I—” His voice shattered again, and something blinding seared across his vision like an echo of the ultimate weapon, the light that stole life and stole death. He swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

Floette tucked its flower under its arm and around the back of its neck to brace it, then rested its elbows on the head of the cattail. It had spent the walk from Lumiose City hovering just the slightest bit behind him, until he had to turn his head to check that it was still there. That it wasn’t some mirage from too many years walking with grief right beside him and desperation holding his hand — he was lucky he had practice walking backwards.

“I’m— I loved you so much,” he tried to explain, and then he took a breath, tried to untangle the words tumbling shattered onto his tongue. “You— I— It was wrong, but— I.” It was almost funny, how an apology he had been practicing for thousands of years could get so confused in the speaking, but mostly it just made him want to cry. “I’m— It was, I— I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Floette made a sound that wasn't a word, one it must have picked up in the three thousand years since they'd last spoken because AZ didn't recognize it at all. He bit his lip and tried to think past the terror that froze him from the inside out, at the thought that he couldn’t make sense of its body language, anymore.

His mouth quirked into a tiny, joyless sort of smile. "You sure gave me a lot of time to think about what I'd done, once I'd got past you being gone at all." 

Floette shrugged. Its face was still cast in the sort of quiet, tired mercilessness it had been wearing every moment since it came back to him — that expression, he knew the meaning of even now. Even though he had hardly seen it on Floette, before it died. 

He’d seen it more than enough on himself, in the intervening years, to recognize it.

"Figured out what I'd done was wrong pretty quick." He caught himself touching his shirt at the chest, where the key to the ultimate weapon had hung heavier than simple metal had any right to be until his brother's descendant stole it. Everything that man had done with it made him want to be sick, but there was a terrible kind of relief, too, at having the weight of it off his neck. "Took me a lot longer to understand why you left, though."

Finally, Floette’s expression shifted. It tilted its head, consideringly, and placed a hand on the stem of its flower. 

AZ held his breath.

"Floette_ , _ " it said, like a human saying _ go on, _ and he thanked Zygarde, and Xerneas, and Yveltal, and Uxie, and Arceus itself, that he could still understand when it spoke.

"I mean," he said, and shrugged with both his mouth and his shoulders, "I don't know how much more I've got to say?" Karrablast shouted at each other in the distance. "I guess I should've destroyed that key, instead of trying to keep it safe. But it was kind of the only thing left of you. One of. I had seeds for awhile— I'm sorry."

"Ette," said Floette, bitingly sarcastic.

“Fair enough,” said AZ, even though Floette’s sharp eyes had undoubtedly caught his flinch. “I planted them, halfway across the world. Eventually, I did. I thought they might like a home away from here. Away from me. And maybe you would find them.” 

Floette was still, unreadable. AZ blinked and blinked until his vision cleared and the world swayed back into focus.

“And then I kept looking for you, even though you left.” A sliver of red sunlight cut a line between the two of them, through grass and mud. “It wasn’t what you wanted. And I knew that, but— I didn’t know what else to do.”

It was odd, the way time was once more defining itself in instants, every second critical, the period between blinking essential. AZ had become used to the way days bled into months bled into decades, the way peoples and kingdoms ebbed and flowed across the land until his successor’s descendants emerged once more to power and made of themselves great kings. He had never been allowed entry to Parfum Palace, but even beggars got glimpses of royalty. And AZ would recognize the look of family anywhere.

“I tell a story, sometimes,” said AZ. He leaned back a little, and tried to keep looking at Floette, because that was the least it was owed. “To anyone willing to listen to strange, grimy old men ramble. About how once upon a time, there was a king, and there was a pokemon he loved very much. And about how that king did a great wrong by the pokemon he loved, so that it left him.”

Lulling, distant, dimming the voices of the karrablast, a chorus of kricketune hummed. 

“Ette floette, floette,” said Floette, after a minute of silence. AZ wondered if it had run out of energy, for recrimination.

“I don’t sound much like a king anymore?” Floette nodded gracefully, every bit as regal as it held itself the last they talked. AZ’s mouth twisted. “I guess. But I haven’t ruled anything in millenia. Let alone anyone. I—” He gestured. “—couldn’t be, not anymore.”

AZ had been king until, shattered into a jagged bewilderment and a tearing sorrow and a creeping, desperate anger at losing Floette all over again, he handed his regalia and his title and the broken fragments of his people to his brother’s second son and fled the castle after it. 

AZ had not been king when his successor gave his brother a king’s burial in the cairn that would have been AZ’s, showering a small wealth of pearls and axes and arrowheads into a dolmen of stone. He had not been king for the next three thousand years, either, as he learned the shape of the world on foot and held the shape of Floette’s flower tight in his memory.

What he had ruled would hardly have counted for anything, to the modern kalosians and their expansive domain — just a small portion of the hilly, rocky heathland nearby modern Geosenge Town and a rough stone fort-castle more similar to a dining hall than any Parfum Palace. After the incident at Geosenge Town, he made path towards it over the course of a slow, sunny day to pay respects, and found a farmer using a tarp draped over the corner of the last two standing walls to shelter a small herd of skiddo. 

And then he turned around and went to find his brother’s grave, instead.

“Flo,” said Floette. Its voice was still high, a fletchling’s voice, and there was still that roughness to it also, something like the sounds a combee would made. AZ wondered what else about Floette had been frozen in time by the ultimate weapon’s light. “Floette. Ette, ette?”

“I loved you. More than I loved my people, or my brother. More than was reasonable, or right. And—” AZ paused, and took a breath that trembled through his throat until it reached his lungs. Floette blinked, still with that terrible patience. “I still do. And I’ve tried to love the world, searching for you, tried to love it, and— help, to make up for everything I ended. But I could never stop loving you, even beyond reason. Even though you had every reason to despise me— Even beyond hope.”

AZ saw his successor once before the man died. That was when he learned, the weight of that key heavy on his neck, that his brother had spent the last years of his life meticulously burying the weapon so that it would never be found, burying its memory in the people left over from the destruction so that it would never be found. That was when he learned that his successor had grown into a better king than AZ had ever been, and that was when he learned the location of his brother’s grave, and wrote the directions to it on his heart.

The next three millenia, he’d had nothing to do but think, and remember, and regret.

Floette shifted again, unwrapped its flower from around itself so that it could hold it again in two hands. 

AZ opened his mouth, and then shut it. 

“It’s not—” AZ said, and felt that jagged thing between his lips again, shattering his sentences into halves and fragments the color of stone. “It’s not like I can be forgiven, by all the pokemon and all the humans I killed, to bring you back and then to end the war. But I can— You live, yet. I can ask it of you.”

He had been a king, once. But he wasn’t anymore, and once his anger had run out, he had learned that a king’s arrogance didn’t suit a beggar at all. He had learned, from the curve of the horizon and the memory of Floette curved into the wind, how to bow. 

He bent his neck, and he whispered: “Please. Forgive me.”

And then he stayed frozen and waited for judgement.

There was a slight breeze, drawing shapes with the wire of the grasses. The chorus of kricketune hummed in and out of earshot, playing the marsh to sleep as dusk drew curtains over the sun. Floette’s cattail bent and swayed, bent and swayed — the breeze caught AZ’s scarf and tugged, gave it weight. Seconds drew themselves wide until they seemed to be hours, days, until, until, until—

Hands the size and weight of gorse petals moving his knotted, tangled hair out of the way, slipping a thin stem behind his ear, letting go.

He looked up, except his vision was watery and unclear, all those shattered things pooling again in his eyes and in his throat. Clumsily, he swiped at his face with a sleeve, opened his eyes to see Floette, flowerless, clasping and unclasping its hands.

“Ette,” it said, and there was finally an emotion on its face that wasn’t cold patience, or mercilessness. Trembling, he brought a hand to his ear, felt the flower there brittle with age and familiarity. “Ette.”

He looked at Floette, and then back at the sky, and then look at Floette again and willed words into being, against the luminous cast of its face, brighter still with tears to match his own. 

He swallowed, and looked at it, and brought his hand up again to touch its flower.

He said, haltingly: “You— you really—”

“Ette,” said Floette, and then pressed its face into the scarf at his neck. Their version of a hug. 

He wondered how much of a toll hatred had taken on it, on the heart of it. Put a tentative, disbelieving hand on its arm, and wondered how much loneliness had hurt it.

How much anger had taken from him; how much desperation had hurt him.

How unbearably lucky he was, to get a second chance.

“I missed you,” he whispered, and if there was awe choking at his voice, it was all Floette deserved. “I’ve seen— so many things, while you were gone. But I haven’t seen anything you’ve seen.” He paused, and waved his spare hand, to encompass the whole world. Three stars lit the sky — night. “We’ve so much to catch up on, but at least — no matter how long it takes — there’s all of eternity to do it in.”

Floette made a noise of agreement — one he remembered, even from three thousand years back — and swooped from under his touch, leaving him cold. It darted upwards, snatched its flower back out from behind AZ’s ear, spun in the air and gestured for him to stand. 

He stood, and despite everything, because of everything, he found himself smiling.

“Guess you’ll just have to show me everything I’ve missed,” he said, heart lighter than it had been in three thousand years. 

Floette quirked its flower, and smiled, and said, “Ette!”

And for all that scars are slow to fade— there wasn’t anything left in the world that could hurt them.

**Author's Note:**

> the implications of Light of Ruin, as a move, just absolutely devastate me: the power that lives in Floette from being revived by the ultimate weapon being something that can be turned to destruction as easily as the ultimate weapon was turned to destruction, and at a similar horrifyingly steep cost… like, ouch  
it’s the light of the ultimate weapon that granted az and floette eternal life, and it’s the light of the ultimate weapon that az used and floette can use to destroy. and thats gen VI’s life-death thematics! or something
> 
> in any case— it’s elul. the high holy days are approaching, and whether you’re jewish or not, wherever you are and whoever you are, i hope you take this fic as an opportunity to make teshuvah: to think about someone youve wronged in the past year, and to apologize, and make amends, and ask of them forgiveness  
in case i don’t post anything else before rosh hashanah, l’shana tova tikatevu, my friends, and i wish you all a sweet new year


End file.
